New Partnership Aims To End Child Porn Related Bitcoin Use

Elliptic, a bitcoin startup based in London, and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a charity monitoring child abuse on the web, are partnering to suppress the use of BTC in online child pornography.

Recently, the IWF provided Elliptic a database of bitcoin addresses that they identified with child porn. With this information, Elliptic can identify those illegal activities on the blockchain (bitcoin’s public ledger of transactions). James Smith, CEO of Elliptic said this regarding their involvement:

“This is the first time anybody has started identifying these crimes in bitcoin and flagging them up in a system like ours. This is a great step … towards our goal of getting rid of any sort of illicit activity in bitcoin.”

Elliptic counts the biggest US and European bitcoin exchanges as clients and also provides evidence to federal agencies in the United States and Europe for major investigations involving bitcoin. According to the firm, their status could make them to “uniquely take action”.

The BTC startup will integrate IWF’s database into their own transaction-monitoring systems and will alert clients when they see transactions from the bitcoin addresses flagged by IWF. Internet Watch Foundation Chief Executive Susie Hargreaves made this statement:

“Over the past few years, we have seen an increasing amount of bitcoin activity connected to purchasing child sexual abuse material online. Our new partnership with Elliptic is imperative to helping us tackle this.”